INDUSTRY BUZZ

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, January 25, 2004

CAPTURE13-d For CAPTURE13, datebook ; Arnold Friedman (father), Elaine Friedman (mother) and their three boys, Jesse (left) David (middle), and Seth (right) at David Friedman's bar mitzvah, from Capturing the Friedmans, a Magnolia Pictures release. (c) Magnolia Pictures ; Inserted into mediagrid on 5/12/03 in . / Magnolia Pictures CAT MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/ -MAGS OUT less

CAPTURE13-d For CAPTURE13, datebook ; Arnold Friedman (father), Elaine Friedman (mother) and their three boys, Jesse (left) David (middle), and Seth (right) at David Friedman's bar mitzvah, from Capturing the ... more

INDUSTRY BUZZ

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INDIES GET RESPECT: One year ago this week, "Capturing the Friedmans" wowed audiences at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary and marked the beginning of an extraordinarily rich progression of American nonfiction films. Judging from the interest generated by nonfiction films this month in Park City, the trend shows no sign of cooling off anytime soon.

Though none of 2003's talked-about documentaries matched the record $21 million box office of Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine," movies like "Friedmans," "Spellbound" and "The Fog of War" did break fresh narrative ground. What's more, they actually made money.

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That fact amazes Mark Urman, theatrical boss for ThinkFilm, which distributed "Spellbound." Jeffrey Blitz's documentary about eight students competing in the 1999 national spelling bee took in nearly $6 million, ranking it with "Bowling," Moore's "Roger & Me" and "Winged Migration," which also came out last year, as one of the all-time highest-grossing documentaries. "Going back seven years, I've distributed highly acclaimed documentaries," Urman says. "They had plenty of prestige, but they did not make money. I felt like I was a missionary."

By feature film standards, documentary revenue may seem like small potatoes, but profits are profits; Urman is bullish enough about the market that he's weighted ThinkFilm's 2004 schedule with four nonfiction features -- "The Agronomist," "Bus 124," "Festival Express" and "The Story of the Weeping Camel" -- and only two conventional movies. "If you had asked me even a year ago if things would come to pass where I'd have twice as many nonfiction films in my lineup, I'd say, 'Get out of here!' "

Urman credits reality-based TV for fostering an audience mind-set that simply didn't exist three or four years ago. "There's nothing about reality TV that's real, and there's no commonality, in most ways, between 'The Bachelor' and, say, 'Capturing the Friedmans,' but there's no question in my mind that they're linked," he says. "A massive population in America these days now associates entertainment with things that don't involve costumes and stars and actors and makeup. They can enjoy the digital, hand-held, you-are-there, this- is-real image quality, whether it's 'Jackass,' or 'Cops,' or something a good deal finer. That threshold needed to be crossed in order for people to be willing to plunk down $10 at the box office and accept a documentary as entertainment."

Elsewhere on the documentary front: "Capturing the Friedmans" director Andrew Jarecki went public this month in his support of Jesse Friedman. As chronicled in Jarecki's film, Jesse Friedman's father was convicted of child molestation and killed himself in prison; Jesse, a teenager at the time, was later convicted on similar charges and served 13 years in prison. The younger Friedman now wants the courts to overturn his 1988 conviction. Jarecki has spent much of the past year compiling evidence for the appeal from materials he accumulated during the making of his documentary.

"For my purposes, it's sort of mandatory to help Jesse get to the next step," Jarecki says. "The vast majority of people who saw the film could agree on two things: Jesse Friedman didn't get a proper hearing and the evidence was fraught with problems. Whatever you believe about the case, Jesse never had a chance. That's something I certainly believe. If this were a shoplifting case, it would have been thrown out a long time ago because of the quality of the evidence. There's no medical evidence, no physical evidence, never a complaint from anyone until after the police went out and started using these suggestive questioning techniques."

Moreover, Jarecki says, "Many people approached us after the film came out, by e-mail or phone or in person, but I have never once come into contact with anyone who told me they had been molested by Jesse Friedman."

There may well be more family drama coming from Jarecki, a versatile talent who co-wrote the theme song for TV's "Felicity" and founded the Moviefone.com Web site before branching into filmmaking. "I've been living in Italy the last two years, in Rome, with kids and wife, and I've actually found an Italian family that is equally dysfunctional as the Friedmans but in a completely different way," Jarecki says. "I may be paying attention to another one of these stories. Once you get into something like this, it can be a little addictive -- you really can't turn away from it."